Dancing the Polka

My bike-buying budget took a big hit recently, because said budget is also my bike-maintaining budget. And January saw quite a lot of expenditure. So, this month, we’ll be looking at a first-generation Kawasaki Versys 1000 that is technically not for sale. Because it’s mine.

I bought my Versys 1000 in December 2023 for £1,000 plus the trade-in value of my 2006 Honda CBF1000. This bike had clearly seen a lot of use up to that point but was in good enough condition. I figured that with a little love it could serve as my go-to moto for the next few years while I save up for something I really want.

The bike initially sat in my garage untouched for a while, because I had bought it when my daughter was 2 months old and it turns out that being a new dad eats up so much brain power than you’d ever imagine. Toward the end of this past summer, though, I began the slow process of ticking off jobs from the maintenance schedule in my Haynes Manual. 

When buying a used motorcycle, I reckon it’s good to assume that the previous owner will not have looked after the bike as well as you might have hoped. There are always exceptions, but it’s safer to assume the worst. 

The first chapter of any Haynes manual focuses on routine maintenance and servicing. At the start of that chapter, there is a list of jobs organized by when you need to do them. For example, the manual suggests that I clean/lube the Versys 1000’s drive chain every 400 miles, that I check brake pads every 3,750 miles, that I change the coolant and fix new hoses every 22,500 miles, and so on, and so on.

My aim is to get through the entire list of jobs as quickly as possible, to get the bike to a kind of ‘clean sheet’ state. After that, I can follow the schedule as normal. It’s the nature of modern motorcycles that if you stay on top of maintenance and servicing your bike will last for a really long time. There were almost 30,000 miles on the clock when I bought this motorcycle; I think it’s reasonable to assume that ─ with faithful adherence to the Haynes Manual maintenance schedule ─ I can get another 50,000 miles out of it.

Cue a side discussion about the importance of doing your own maintenance. If you don’t like the idea of working on your own bike, I completely get where you’re coming from ─ after all, riding is always more fun than wrenching ─ but you can save an insane amount of money by doing so. Even if you just do small jobs it’s worth it. My local Kawasaki dealership charges £70 an hour for labor; change your own oil and you’ve bought dinner for yourself and someone else at a pub.

Beyond that, there’s the almost comically intense feeling of accomplishment and fulfillment that comes from doing things yourself. I’ll get into this in a “How to be a better man” article some day, but one of the things that I have been slow to learn in life is the incredible importance of building shit ─ physical and intangible. With regular maintenance you are ‘building’ a motorcycle that you can rely on.

Going back to that oil change: all you’re really doing is unscrewing a bolt, then screwing it back in. If you want to do a proper job, you’ll unscrew an oil filter and screw in a new one. My now 15-month-old daughter already has the manual dexterity to do this. Yet, once you do it, you can hear a difference in how your engine runs. You can feel it. Your bike is demonstrably better because of you, because of something you did. And the knock-on emotional effect of that is dramatic. The first time you do a job like that for yourself, you’ll spend the rest of your day walking around thinking: “I am very proud of myself… Boy, am I impressive.“

The key to success in this is being honest with yourself about what you can actually do. For me, valve clearances feel like something beyond my current intellectual capacity. There’s too much precision. So, getting it done by a professional has been one of the expenditures I mentioned.

Brake pads, I can do. But the rear caliper of a Versys 1000 has a so-called “pad pin plug,” which had seized because of corrosion. It needed to be drilled out by a professional. So, there’s another expenditure. En route to have that done, I picked up a puncture in my almost-new (only about 400 miles) Michelin Road 6 tire. More expenditure.

On top of that, the bike’s annual MOT and vehicle tax were due. So, with all this, you can see why the bike I can afford this month is the bike that I already have.

What the ad says:

There’s no ad for this one, obviously. But here are the particulars of the machine in question. It presently has 31,140 miles on the clock. A look at its MOT history shows that it has passed all but one of its MOT tests; in 2017 it failed because the front and rear tire valve stems were damaged.

Modern Kawasakis are somewhat notorious for having certain bits and bobs that don’t weather terribly well. Without religious application of ACF-50, sidestands and certain fixing bolts rust. My bike is no exception.

Speaking of sidestands, it has been my observation ─ ever since I rode a GTR1400 to Milan nine years ago ─ that Kawasaki does not equip its bikes with sidestands that are fit for purpose. It seems the mounting plate for my bike’s sidestand has bent over the years, meaning the bike leans excessively when parked on it. Useful when parking in strong winds, I suppose, but not the most fun when hefting something that has a 239kg wet weight.

I generally avoid this issue by parking the bike on its center stand, but at some point I’m going to fix the thing. Which means more expenditure.

The bike came to me with a set of Oxford Hot Grips that are worn and had stopped working; I’ve  disconnected those and plan to put in new standard grips this summer. 

The bike had a new rear shock installed at 21,000 miles. It also has rugged BarkBusters handguards, as well as an aftermarket adventure bike beak that is so utterly pointless that it almost makes me angry (though, not so angry that I’ve made any effort to remove it yet). 

So far, all I’ve added is a Givi AirFlow screen, which is something that I cannot recommend enough (these things completely transform a bike). Beyond all that, everything else is stock. If for some reason you want my bike, I’ll happily accept a good-condition ABS-equipped Honda ST1300 Pan-European in trade.

What is it?

The KLZ1000, aka, Versys 1000, was first introduced in 2012 and has remained a part of Kawasaki’s line-up ever since (its capacity having recently been boosted, it is now known as the Versys 1100). The big-boy version of the popular Versys 650 that had been around since 2007, the Versys 1000 was initially an odd duck of a motorcycle that seemed a little unsure of what it was.

The bike’s name is derived from the phrase “versatile system,” which is Kawasaki’s way of saying “all-rounder.” In a weird, ‘snake eating its own tail’ sort of way, the story of my current motorcycle starts with the first bike I owned in the UK: a Honda CBF600. That bike was an all-rounder driven by a detuned CBR600 engine. Kawasaki saw its success and decided to pull the same trick with a detuned version of its Ninja 650 engine. The Versys 650 was much vaunted by owners and earned “Motorcycle of the Year” from Motorcyclist magazine, as well as a Best in Class award from MCN.

Team Green decided to see if lightning could strike twice and turned to the 1043cc liquid-cooled inline four of the Z1000SX (aka Ninja 1000SX) to serve as the engine for a bigger Versys. Detuned from 138 horsepower to a still-considerable 118 hp (the BMW R 1200 GS at the time claimed 108 hp), the bike promised 75 lb-ft of torque (as much as a Harley-Davidson Sportster 1200), with much of that grunt arriving low in the rev range.

The bike’s ergonomics were that of an adventure machine, but with its 17-inch wheels and sportbike-derived brakes and suspension it was clearly designed to stick to paved roads. You might be inclined to see the Versys 1000 as one of the first upright sport tourers, but it was too big and heavy (and, arguably, underpowered) to be truly sporty. In that same vein, it was too big, heavy, powerful, and expensive to be the cheerful all-rounder that the Versys 650 was.

These days, Kawasaki refers to the Versys 1100 as an “adventure tourer,” which is probably giving it too much credit. It’s a touring bike. And it was back in 2012, too. The problem is: we expect certain things from a touring bike that the Versys 1000 didn’t originally have. I suspect this is because Kawasaki had approached the Versys 1000 from the mindset of: “It’s like the Versys 650 but bigger.” 

The Versys 650 was an affordable all-rounder, so no one cared that it didn’t have a gear indicator, 12v ports, cruise control, or the like. These days, the platform has all that and more, but the first-gen Versys 1000 was oddly barebones in the face of competition. Yes, it did at least come with ABS, traction control, and three riding modes, but against offerings from BMW, Ducati, Triumph, and others it felt a bit “meh.”

Also going against the first-gen model was the fact that moto-journalists hated the way it looked.

Fortunately for Kawasaki, there was still enough good to outshine the meh. It became one of those ‘if you know, you know’ bikes: no one was placing it on their dream board, but it was loved by owners. It still is. I have twice had fellow Versys 1000 owners run out into the street to excitedly tell me that they have a Versys 1000, too!

Is it better than my previous motorcycles?

This is kind of surprising to me, but, yeah: for the most part, this is one of the best motorcycles I’ve ever owned. I’d even go so far as to place it above my 2017 Triumph Tiger Explorer XRx. That bike had shaft drive, more technowhizzbangery, (marginally) smoother power delivery, and considerably more horsepower and torque. But the Kawasaki is more stable at speed, better balanced, and not as top heavy. So it feels more usably fast.

I enjoy the engine. It delivers a good lump of torque when you twist the throttle, and can be just a little bit jerky if you’re being lazy-minded, but at steady speeds it’s incredibly smooth. At 75 mph on the motorway it sits so low and steady in the revs that I sometimes think the tachometer is broken. Crack the throttle, though, and the bike will happily rocket forward, front end lifting and engine barking like a psychopath.

It’s the Dan Morgan of motorcycles. (That’s an obscure reference. In 2023, Mark Wahlberg was in a movie called The Family Plan, in which he played a normal suburban dad who is, in fact, the world’s greatest assassin.) 

The transmission is a little clunky, though. Apparently that’s just a thing with these bikes.

Once you get your head around its weight, the bike handles really well. It is also all-day comfortable. The rider’s seat is huge and passenger accommodation is ginormous. Indeed, the whole thing is big; I’d guess that the space from one handlebar end to the other is close to a meter. That means I don’t feel comfortable filtering through traffic at times, but on the open road this bike is so roomy and relaxed (especially now that I have the AirFlow screen) that I daydream of jaunts to Eastern Europe.

As mentioned, there is no gear indicator, which strikes me as the world’s biggest oversight. By 2012, pretty much every bike had a gear indicator.

Fuel efficiency is decent from the 21-liter tank. I can get 200 miles before the fuel light comes on, at which point I generally have three liters of fuel left. It may be a quirk of my particular bike, but the speedometer can be off by as much as 10 percent at times, and its fuel range display is nothing short of useless.

Space under the seat is big enough to hold a tire repair kit and waterproof jacket, as well as the bike’s good-quality toolkit ─ conveniently housed in a durable waterproof plastic cylinder.

Would I buy it again?

I wouldn’t buy another bike from the place that I bought this one (They told me it had been “recently serviced” but when I got into doing the work myself it became VERY clear that was not true), but I definitely don’t regret buying a first-gen Versys 1000. Heck, despite its rust and quirks, I don’t regret buying this particular one.

Contrary to majority opinion, I really like the blockish look of the bike. Indeed, I prefer it over the current styling. You can see just a little bit of a Ducati Multistrada 1000DS in its aesthetic, but on the whole, the first-gen Versys 1000 is truly unique. It looks like nothing else (apart from a Versys 650, of course). I think that’s cool. Especially since most Kawasakis look generic to me.

Working on the bike can be a little tedious, because you have to remove panels or fairing for every job. And you have to lift the tank to change the air filter. But it’s mostly straightforward. The bike shares a whole lot of bits with the Z1000 and Z1000SX, and, for the most part, the core platform for these three bikes didn’t change from 2010 to 2024. So, finding parts is not hard.

I don’t ever feel like a bad-ass when I’m riding this bike, but I always enjoy it. The engine is engaging, the comfort levels are on par with a more dedicated kinda-big touring rig, and there’s acres of space for strapping on Kriega bags.

Not only would I buy this bike again, I’d go so far as to buy another one. If I won the lottery tomorrow, I’d go out and buy an all-bells-and-whistles Versys 1100 SE.